Media centers ,could be cd or more.

mantis

Whats up people???
I plan on starting serious research into media servers/centers. I want one that does cd's as cd quality and can send it VIA digital connection. HDMI would be perfect but not necessary. I wouldn't mind multi streams out as well. Like 4 to 6 would be very cool so I could stream music in different rooms at the same time.
I also wouldn't mind one that could store dvd movies. This would be huge and also stream out at least 4 at the same time. So that you could call into the server and watch in any room .

Currently there are several system that do this but are extremely expensive. I also have not really judged there performance. I'm looking for a cd first server. I could build one out of a PC but if someone already make a very nice one, I'm interested in checking it out.

I have access to the Elan VIA Dj which is a product we sell at work. I never really got in front of it and judged it as a cd player. I might get one as it does do 4 streams out which would be very cool.

I also wonder how good a Apple Tv would be for this duty? Using external hard drives is a huge plus as you could store all you want.

This is the way of the future and having disc's is getting old. Even Blu ray would be very cool on a hard drive.I would love to see that. Then all the dirty disc problems would go away. No storing all those boxes. All inside a hard drive.

Dan

okiepolkie

Two letters for you Dan: I.P. (many discussions there on this topic)

Other than that, how about a new Mac Mini. Digital out(add a dac if you want better sq). DVI/HDMI out. Relatively easy to control with URC, iphone, itouch, or the like. Easy to add external storage.

With that said, I'm using a Control4 HC300, streaming music from an NAS. Through the interface, I can pick out stored music, or can stream Rhapsody.

F1nut

This is the way of the future and having disc's is getting old. Even Blu ray would be very cool on a hard drive.I would love to see that. Then all the dirty disc problems would go away. No storing all those boxes. All inside a hard drive.

It's only the way of the future if one buys into it. I don't, nor will I.

Dirty disc problems? Handle them correctly and there is no problem.

Hard drive? Crash and burn baby, crash and burn. It's only a matter of time. Sure, you can back it up, but there's no guarantee it won't go bad just sitting around. Which, of course, is never a problem with a disc.

Way of the future....Pffft.

okiepolkie

I forgot to mention it before, but you would use apple tv's to add streams to the system.

Also, I'm assuming this is for your house, so the configuration could be done a room at a time by adding apple tv's.

And as far as individual room control, what are plans? Elan? URC? AMX/Crestron?

venomclan

I like the idea for music, but not for movies. If I get too lazy to put a disc in a machine and watch it for 2 hours, I have bigger problems. All can be done using computers, if that is your thing. I am of the camp that, my computer and HT/2 channel will never meet. I like independent units that serve their own function very well, not relying on a computer running 24/7 and set to crash, virus, etc. But that is me.

I like the idea of the Wadia i170 and Ipod for all my music. This seems the most inexpensive way without losing quality.
Venom

vijayl

HP Media Smart Server is the way to go. It streams in most, if not all the audio format. It also streams most SD and HD video as well.
I have tried photo playback on SC-07, its basic and I'm not impressed with streaming photos on IP. I wud recommend using PS3 for viewing photos and video.
HP MSS does meet ur criteria in multi-streaming easily..

Face

I use my PC as a lossless audio/blu ray server in one rig. It doesn't get anymore convenient than that...changing CD's is almost as annoying as flipping vinyl.

I have most of my music backed up in triplicate, so no worries about a crash.

In my dedicated 2 channel rig I still use CD's and vinyl. I have a Squeezebox Duet hooked up to it, but even using my Cambridge 840C and a processor, it doesn't sound as good as the real thing.

Ender

Face wrote: »

I use my PC as a lossless audio/blu ray server in one rig. It doesn't get anymore convenient than that...changing CD's is almost as annoying as flipping vinyl.

I have most of my music backed up in triplicate, so no worries about a crash.

In my dedicated 2 channel rig I still use CD's and vinyl. I have a Squeezebox Duet hooked up to it, but even using my Cambridge 840C and a processor, it doesn't sound as good as the real thing.

Same here. I built myself a pretty dang sweet HTPC. Stores tons of music and movies or I can just play CD's, DVD's, and BD straight off the optical drive. And has tons of output options including HDMI, DVI, Digital, and Analog.

Face

Sounds like our setups are similar. I have options for HDMI, DVI, Digital Coax/Optical, and Analog too, but for some reason my receiver (Onkyo 705) does not get along with my video card (nVidia 260GTX?). So I'm stuck with DVI for picture and digital coax for audio.

Fortunately, my DAC(DacMagic) also has a digital output. So for 2 channel, it processes and sends the signal onto my 2 channel preamp with HT bypass(Goldpoint SA-4HT), but for HT, it passes a digital signal onto my Oinkyo.

bopicasso

I use my ps3 to stream all my music/videos/pictures in lossless format from a harddrive on my computer over my wireless network.. Works great and sounds the same as playing a cd in the cdp. Plus great for when you just want to shuffle your whole collection.. Which in my case is 250gb of music..

ben62670

Face wrote: »

I use my PC as a lossless audio/blu ray server in one rig. It doesn't get anymore convenient than that...changing CD's is almost as annoying as flipping vinyl.

I have most of my music backed up in triplicate, so no worries about a crash.

In my dedicated 2 channel rig I still use CD's and vinyl. I have a Squeezebox Duet hooked up to it, but even using my Cambridge 840C and a processor, it doesn't sound as good as the real thing.

We have to talk again soon. I have seen the light with a hard drive based lossless media server. I too was fighting it tooth and nail, but having all my CD's on a hard drive with no skipping, or having to change them sounds very appealing to me. My friend Jerry has a Yami HD based CD player that works great. Load the Cd's into it and you are done. Sounds great. No issues with the Cd's being read during heavy bass notes, and I have worn some Cd's out over the years. I raid drives so a PC based HTPC would be just fine. Also with the price of HD's dropping so low you can stuff the kids favorite movies in there no problem:)

nooshinjohn

I am seriously considering one of them as well. My current favorite is this one...
'
http://www.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/cls.pl?dgtlplay&1242884335&/McIntosh-ms300---amx-10.5-touc

I don't know much about them and am still doing some homework.

ben62670

Eh. I'll make one and veneer it to match my speakers:)

fatchowmein

Ah, the future. I've been experimenting with HTPC's for close to ten years now but mostly with DIY boxes. At the moment, the movie feature is heavily supported by freeware so it's a great time to build your own movie box, especially if you're using a HTPC front end and file server backend (I like Windows Home Server for convenience). See http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=14239742#post14239742. Hardware prices are reasonable, especially with 1.5TB drives going for $117 at Fry's.

As for music on the Windows side, blah, but honestly I haven't tested the music side since Windows Media Center. First, I don't like the interface and you better have a keyboard. Second, media center, which runs off of Windows Media Player, doesn't like flac or m4a (apple lossless) and all of my stuff is in m4a. This means having to look for the Orban pluggin. Orban works for m4a by having wmp stream audio like a video file but since there's no chapters in a song, FF and RW only skips or goes back to the previous song (not sure if that matters to you). Third, I hate messing with pluggins and codecs. Now that I have Vista Media Center playing VC1, h264, mkv correctly, I don't want to jack with the audio and risk blowing things up although it's unlikely. I may experiment later once I'm done converting my movie library to the file server. Hopefully, somebody has a neat freeware addon for music similar to what was done on the movie side (My Movies, Open Media Library, Media Browser, etc). For now, I have my music in m4a sitting protected on Windows Home Server playing out to my squeezebox classic and duet.

So far, the movie box has been a huge hit with the wife and I'm putting away all of the DVD's which the wife complained made her living room look like a dorm room. :rolleyes:

Blu-ray/HD-DVD rip to the hard drive requires AnyDVD and a quadcore (or a fast dual core) plus time spent reading on the doom9 forum. Very cool but eats up drive space like crazy.

Good luck and let us know if you find a sweet solution. I hope to read about a commercial home entertainment solution that's simple like Popcorn Hour. The tech support involved for htpc/file server solution is beyond what I believe most folks would want to do. Looking forward to the feedback to this thread.

Ender

nooshinjohn wrote: »

I am seriously considering one of them as well. My current favorite is this one...
'
http://www.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/cls.pl?dgtlplay&1242884335&/McIntosh-ms300---amx-10.5-touc

I don't know much about them and am still doing some homework.

LOL!!! What a terrible rip. I built mine for like 1.5k to 2k (not exactly sure right now) and that was going overboard.

fatchowmein wrote: »

Ah, the future. I've been experimenting with HTPC's for close to ten years now but mostly with DIY boxes. At the moment, the movie feature is heavily supported by freeware so it's a great time to build your own movie box, specifically if you're using a HTPC front end and file server backend (I like Windows Home Server for convenience). See http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=14239742#post14239742. Hardware prices are reasonable, especially with 1.5TB drives going for $117 at Fry's.

As for music on the Windows side, blah, but honestly I haven't tested the music side since Windows Media Center. First, I don't like the interface and you better have a keyboard. Second, media center, which runs off of Windows Media Player, doesn't like flac or m4a (apple lossless) and all of my stuff is in m4a. This means having to look for the Orban pluggin. Orban works for m4a by having wmp stream audio like a video file but since there's no chapters in a song, FF and RW only skips or goes back to the previous song (not sure if that matters to you). Third, I hate messing with pluggins and codecs. Now that I have Media Center playing VC1, h264, mkv correctly, I don't want to jack with the audio and risk blowing things up although it's unlikely. I may experiment later once I'm done converting my movie library to the file server. Hopefully, somebody has a neat freeware addon for music similar to what was done on the movie side (My Movies, Open Media Library, Media Browser, etc). For now, I have my music in m4a sitting protected on Windows Home Server playing out to my squeezebox classic and duet.

So far, the movie box has been a huge hit with the wife and I'm putting away all of the DVD's which the wife complained made her living room look like a dorm room. :rolleyes:

Blu-ray/HD-DVD rip to the hard drive requires AnyDVD and a quadcore (or a fast dual core) plus time spent reading on the doom9 forum. Very cool but eats up drive space like crazy.

Good luck and let us know if you find a sweet solution. I hope to read about a commercial home entertainment solution that's simple like Popcorn Hour. The tech support involved for htpc/file server solution is beyond what I believe most folks would want to do. Looking forward to the feedback to this thread.

For media players, the ones that will play all or almost all formats will be things like VLC, XBMC, and/or J. River Media Center.

ryanjoachim

fatchowmein wrote: »

Ah, the future. I've been experimenting with HTPC's for close to ten years now but mostly with DIY boxes. At the moment, the movie feature is heavily supported by freeware so it's a great time to build your own movie box, especially if you're using a HTPC front end and file server backend (I like Windows Home Server for convenience). See http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=14239742#post14239742. Hardware prices are reasonable, especially with 1.5TB drives going for $117 at Fry's.

As for music on the Windows side, blah, but honestly I haven't tested the music side since Windows Media Center. First, I don't like the interface and you better have a keyboard. Second, media center, which runs off of Windows Media Player, doesn't like flac or m4a (apple lossless) and all of my stuff is in m4a. This means having to look for the Orban pluggin. Orban works for m4a by having wmp stream audio like a video file but since there's no chapters in a song, FF and RW only skips or goes back to the previous song (not sure if that matters to you). Third, I hate messing with pluggins and codecs. Now that I have Vista Media Center playing VC1, h264, mkv correctly, I don't want to jack with the audio and risk blowing things up although it's unlikely. I may experiment later once I'm done converting my movie library to the file server. Hopefully, somebody has a neat freeware addon for music similar to what was done on the movie side (My Movies, Open Media Library, Media Browser, etc). For now, I have my music in m4a sitting protected on Windows Home Server playing out to my squeezebox classic and duet.

So far, the movie box has been a huge hit with the wife and I'm putting away all of the DVD's which the wife complained made her living room look like a dorm room. :rolleyes:

Blu-ray/HD-DVD rip to the hard drive requires AnyDVD and a quadcore (or a fast dual core) plus time spent reading on the doom9 forum. Very cool but eats up drive space like crazy.

Good luck and let us know if you find a sweet solution. I hope to read about a commercial home entertainment solution that's simple like Popcorn Hour. The tech support involved for htpc/file server solution is beyond what I believe most folks would want to do. Looking forward to the feedback to this thread.

I'm looking into gathering a bunch of spare drives I have laying around and putting them into my wife's old PC to use it as a FTP/Print server.
Any suggestions or tips to avoid issues along this route?

Also, what do you recommend as the OS for a file/print server?

steveinaz

Interesting thread Dan, I was just about to start picking your brain on this the other day, after you had mentioned media servers a few times.

I have built numerous computers, so the hardware side I could research/accomplish without a problem--but I'm not much of a software-savy type, so I would need input on good databasing software, or whatever is used to catalog the music. I need to get my read on as I haven't kept up with the latest hardware technology very well, but usually a week of research and I'm right back on top of it. To give you an idea of how out-of-touch I am, I'm still using my last build (6 years old), an AMD Athlon XP 2200setup w/Asus motherboard (A7N8X-X), 2GB PC2100 DDR, and a whopping 40GB hard drive...LOL

I'm guessing the main focus' would be a very good sound card and quiet/top quality power supply hardware---and of course a quality motherboard. From what I understand, processing power doesn't need to be anything stellar.

Great thread, any other builders out there that have built a bare-bones HDD server?

RonS WIN-TEAM

@stevinaz, you might try checking out the Windows Home Server. They have some great add-ins that make sharing stuff like music and videos pretty easy.

Here’s the link: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

You can also download and try it out for 120 days: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/eval.mspx

Cheers,
Ron
Windows Outreach Team

ryanjoachim

Windows Outreach Team?

Is Windows a religion now?

steveinaz

"I always feel like, somebody's watching meeeeeeeeee." LOL

bruss

hell my directv box can read all my music and movies from tversity.. All backed up with the originals sitting in their jackets collecting dust in case of data loss. Music comes across encoded as PCM if the file is unreadable by the end device.. Add a ps3 in the mix and it gets even better.

ben62670

RonS WIN-TEAM wrote: »

@stevinaz, you might try checking out the Windows Home Server. They have some great add-ins that make sharing stuff like music and videos pretty easy.

Here’s the link: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

You can also download and try it out for 120 days: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/eval.mspx

Cheers,
Ron
Windows Outreach Team

WOW Microsoft has dropped to spamming an audio website forum:eek: Maybe we should take up a collection for BG:p

Marty913

ryanjoachim wrote: »

Windows Outreach Team?

Is Windows a religion now?

WIndows has always been a religion for some. It's Apple that's the cult.

jinjuku

I have a DIY media server. Using Vista (MCE is about the only thing it is good for).

I have the My Movies plug in for DVD management. My entire collection is managed. Just a remote away to watching a movie. My Movies really fills in the gap for library management.

You can list by Genre, last added, all. There are even parental controls the My Movies also goes out and pulls front and back cover art.

Since I subscribe to Netlfix, I installed the My Netflix plug in. If you get Vista MCE RSS reader you can quasi integrate Hulu.

I REALLY wish MS would get native blu-ray play and also work with Netflix and Hulu to get solid plug-ins for MCE.

I am using an older ATI Radeon 1950GT but it does do 1080 off load.
The 48XX series will have HDMI and also support audio over HDMI. Feed that to your receiver and let it do the decode. The computer will do a better job upconverting DVD's than any external processor out there.

The issue with Blu-Ray is that movies can be 25-50 GB. You would need A LOT of HD.

You can get a sub $100 AMD 780 mainboard that will have an integrated 3200 GPU. Put on a $50 heasink and go fanless. Get a 45Watt Athlon processor and it will run cool and quite. The Antec Earthwatts PSU is quiet.

Another thing you could do is get a 64GB SSD (solid state drive) and get an external network attached drive or raid array.

cnh

bopicasso wrote: »

I use my ps3 to stream all my music/videos/pictures in lossless format from a harddrive on my computer over my wireless network.. Works great and sounds the same as playing a cd in the cdp. Plus great for when you just want to shuffle your whole collection.. Which in my case is 250gb of music..

Say bo....

I'm a bit new to the PS3 scene and know you can use it as a media server. Let's say I don't game much and wanted to use the actual PS3 hard drive to store a bunch of CDs on in lossless format. Could I do that through a USB from a laptop to the PS3's USB or do I have to do it over the wireless network? It would be 'convenient to say use about 40 gigs (maybe 50+ cds worth or so that I can access directly from the unit?

Thanks..

cnh

jinjuku

cnh wrote: »

Say bo....

I'm a bit new to the PS3 scene and know you can use it as a media server. Let's say I don't game much and wanted to use the actual PS3 hard drive to store a bunch of CDs on in lossless format. Could I do that through a USB from a laptop to the PS3's USB or do I have to do it over the wireless network? It would be 'convenient to say use about 40 gigs (maybe 50+ cds worth or so that I can access directly from the unit?

Thanks..

cnh

You could get an external USB drive and plug right into the PS3. 640GB units are around $70 at sites like newegg/zipzoomfly. For $70 not to much trouble and a lot of storage.

ben62670

OK I am at the point of ripping media to the HD. I want to be able to use MS media players so I went WMA lossless. I have my PC in the basement right below my DAC. I am using my laptop as the "remote" via RDC. What is the best way to rip these CD's so I can use them in other machines in the house?
Thanks
Ben

ben62670

38 CD's sor far. Can WMP11 rip without copy protection? I want to keep all these rips on a hard drive to use with multipul OS'es, and also for when I upgrade my puter? Any issues? Yes I am going to back them up:)
Thanks
Ben

Ender

There's copy protection on music CD's...? If so I haven't noticed any...

ben62670

Ender wrote: »

There's copy protection on music CD's...? If so I haven't noticed any...

What MS has done if you rip with MP is to protect what wasn't protected. There is an option to turn it off. I found it after ripping a dozen or so CD's:o I am not sure if it can be turned off with MP 10/11, but I want to be able to use these files on any machine. Again I am kinda stuck with WMA lossless so I can use an HTPC running media center. Obviously HTPC's are not my thing.

Ender

You have to use WMP?